The mountain is very high, and up on its summit, far above the thick wash of grey clouds that hides the truth of the world from people like you, the winds of prophecy whisper strange whisperings into my ears. I go up there for you, to hear the future on the wind. But whenever I descend from the mountain with new prophecies for the coming year, it’s to a bunch of miserable complaints from you lot. Apparently, my prophecies ‘aren’t accurate.’ Apparently, I’m just ‘making up things that sound interesting with no actual vatic quality.’ Apparently I’m ‘outperformed by every prediction market going plus a bunch of supposedly psychic aquarium creatures.’ The evidence is that in 2023 I predicted that Donald Trump would die, and he didn’t, and then in 2024 I predicted that the US election would be won by nobody, and it wasn’t. ‘The 2024 election,’ I wrote, ‘will simply never end. The rallies and debates and frenzied arguments will continue past November, through all of 2025, and out the other end.’ I’m told the Democrats are still fundraising as if there’s something at stake, but everyone else has agreed that there was in fact a winner, and it was Donald Trump. Meanwhile, I predicted that the Tories would somehow win the general election in the UK, which they didn’t, and that 2024 would feature some major act of fuckery by the Dutch, which they’ve managed to keep well hidden. It’s got to the point where I can’t so much as descend from my mountain without a mob of furious peasants braying unintelligibly at me while pointing at various misshapen vegetables whose advent I apparently failed to foresee.
I refuse to apologise. You haven’t been up on the mountain; I have. My prophecies are perfect. You live beneath the clouds, and you simply haven’t understood.
Take my election prophecy. Yes, I said that ‘Trump and Biden are the perma-candidates in the Forever Election; they’ll probably still be the perma-candidates long after their physical bodies have died.’ (I did correctly predict a Trump victory in September, but that doesn’t count.) Isn’t it weird, though, that the best part of a prophecy supposedly about how immovable Trump and Biden are was instead devoted to Kamala Harris? In the depths of last winter, I somehow had a vision of the Brat Summer that was coming. This is how prophecy works. There are wheels within wheels here; it takes a subtle reader to look past the overt content and see how I was actually completely right all along. Most readers are not subtle readers. But I think you might be. I don’t know how I can tell, but I have this strange sense that you’re better and smarter than the dumb pigs who read my prophecies. You see what’s really going on. You aren’t fooled by the surfaces of things…
If you need any more evidence, though, I’ll just point out that one year ago I wrote that while AI wouldn’t replace literary prose, it would start replacing ordinary conversation. ‘Increasingly, your messages to your group chat will be written by AI. The machines will communicate for everyone in the same friendly, even tone, and everyone’s group chat will contain the same roster of mildly funny memes. You will look at them and feel nothing, and push a button to generate your response.’ Apple is now advertising my nightmares as a nifty new feature. I prophesied that all the Simone Weil-inflected flirtation with religious dogma had reached a cultural saturation point and we’d be heading back towards a kind of resurgent Even Newer Atheism, and last year the Grey Tribe scored its first act of spectacular public violence, which is basically a Bar Mitzvah for ideologies. (More on that later.) I prophesied that the new alternative media would start to recede, and everything would return to being consolidated around a few big mainstream outlets, and this has turned out truer than I ever imagined: in fact, this year’s most lively topic of debate on Substack, the home of lively debate, is how much worse Substack is than traditional magazine publishing.
If the overt meanings of last year’s prophecies were sometimes confusing, though, it can only be because I arrived at them in part through a three-card Tarot draw. I saw the year unfold in the Hermit, the Page of Pentacles, and the King of Pentacles. But the Tarot is a subtle instrument, and reading it requires digging through many strata of meaning, all of them obscure. Maybe you need a clearer, more scientific approach. Luckily, we have one.
The year 2025 was born on January 1st, 2025, which makes it a Capricorn. Capricorn is an Earth sign, grounded, plodding, materialistic; one of the draught animals of the Zodiac. It’s under the rulership of Saturn: the melancholy king at the edge of space, who sets the limit and imposes the law, god of age and time. The obvious conclusion is that 2025 will not be a year of revolutions. We’ll see more reactionary retrenchment, more state crackdowns, more grey normality over the earth. The only problem is that every year is a Capricorn, since they all begin in early January. 1789 was a Capricorn; 1968 was a Capricorn. The numbered calendar year is always a Capricorn because the numbered calendar year is a bureaucratic imposition on the wild flows of time. Fortunately, we’re not limited to sun sign astrology, but the planets all seem to be telling the same story. 2025 was born at midnight on Caroline Island in Kiribati, an uninhabited atoll that happens to be the first patch of land after the International Date Line. This puts the Moon in 2025’s sixth house: it’ll be a humble, housebound year, sickly, mildly feeble. There might not be another pandemic, but it’ll feel like there is. Venus is in the seventh house, the House of Balance. This year will be dowdy, unsexy; not necessarily unfulfilling but basically passionless. A cultural trend away from both expressive blue-haired perversion and frothing inceldom, towards a generally neutral erotic stasis. Mars is in the twelfth house: the sector of the sky reserved for dreams, mystery, the shadow, the unthinking parts of the mind. There will be secret wars. Nameless conflicts fought underground. The same goes for the culture war: you will no longer know what to call your enemy, or even what side you yourself are on.
But I know, because I’ve heard it on the mountain. This is what I can tell you about your year:
Politics is already over
Two big things allegedly happened while I was away. Firstly, the Assad regime in Syria—which had survived over thirteen years of civil war, clawing back almost all its former territory inch by shell-blasted inch—completely collapsed in a rebel offensive that barely lasted a week. During the middle of the offensive, the CEO of a major American health insurance firm was assassinated in broad daylight in New York. The alleged killer turned out to be a handsome and charming twenty-six-year-old with sexy eyebrows and an impressive physique, and he became an instant folk hero. Crowds cheer Luigi Mangione as he’s paraded into a courtroom. Crowds wave revolutionary flags in the old centre of Damascus. Some of them are dressed like SpongeBob SquarePants. Everything seems fluid again. Politics is back; history is back; big mass energies are being unleashed, the world can be overthrown in an instant…
I’m not so sure. Last year, I prophesied that one single political event, the US presidential election, would not happen. This time, I may as well go double or quits. There will be absolutely no political events whatsoever in 2025.
I think this is actually a fairly reasonable prediction, since basically everything that passes for politics turns out to be something else. Look at Syria. How did the regime fall so fast? The government forces that had held the state together by killing maybe half a million of its citizens seemed to suddenly dissolve into nothing. There was no great last stand, not even in the capital, not even in the Alawite regions along the coast. The chemical weapons stayed in their silos. No cities pounded into rubble. No long gruelling battles. The entire country was won and lost with only a few hundred casualties on each side. The reason the regime fell so quickly is that there was no regime. Bashar al-Assad might have lingered around his palace in Damascus, a great gormless national ghost, but his government was essentially overthrown maybe a decade ago. Syria was actually governed by an intricate feudal patchwork of local militia, armed tribes, mafia groups, religious orders, narco gangs, reconciled rebels, and foreign actors. All of these ruled their own minor fiefdoms through various forms of extortion, criminality, and terror, but the only ones with any real military capacity were the foreign actors. In 2024, Iran and Hezbollah had bigger problems than the fate of the world’s biggest captagon factory, and pulled out. The wave that followed wasn’t really an offensive in any conventional sense. All these local fiefs simply changed the patches on their camo jackets. Before, they had been sitting in plastic chairs, smoking and collecting bribes while calling themselves the Syrian Arab Army. Now, they’re doing it while calling themselves the Syrian Salvation Government. There’s one fewer Damascene with a head like a toilet brush, and one more in Moscow. Aside from that, essentially nothing has changed.
Syria is the model for everything that will appear to happen in 2025. There will be no events. There will be no shifts. The entire discourse of politics will spiral into irrelevance. What you will get, though, are various versions of an amphetamine gang sewing new patches onto their shirts.
There was a very palpable disappointment from dead-end political commentators when the mystery health insurance assassin was finally named as Luigi Mangione, because Mangione’s politics were seemingly impossible to place. He liked Joe Rogan, the notion of masculinity, and Atlas Shrugged, but he also disliked climate change, Jordan Peterson, and, clearly, the private healthcare system. According to his Goodreads, he’d read the Unambomber manifesto, but given it a lukewarm four-star review. Meanwhile, he gave five stars to something called The Bullet Journal Method: Track the Past, Order the Present, Design the Future. He appears to have been the only person ever radicalised into violence by TED talks. The consensus is that Mangione’s politics were incoherent: he took bits and pieces from various systems of thought and combined them into a misshapen ideological golem of his own design. But his politics were perfectly coherent, they just weren’t a politics.
What Mangione ultimately believed in was an ideology of personal optimisation. This is what’s left after all politics have been exhausted, the 2010s left and the 2020s right. There’s still the relentless need to improve something, but it’s no longer directed outwards. As we’ve discovered, another world is not actually possible, but there are ways to live better in this one. You can cut down on caffeine and pornography, organise your notebooks, work out more efficiently at the gym, and listen to podcasts that nourish your brain instead of numbing it. Collective action is foreclosed, but there’s still time to get on a good nootropics stack. None of this is incoherent; it makes perfect sense. It makes sense to limit your focus to the things you can change. Or when you lift your gaze to the world at large again, it makes sense to consider all social conflicts as engineering problems. There are blockages in the free flow of smart ideas that prevent systems from running optimally. Some of those blockages can be cleared with the right information, or with mosquito nets. Some of them can be cleared with bullets.
This Tim Urbanism-Andrew Hubermanism is not the only nonpolitical ideology circulating. There’s a closely related variant that encourages you to get into massive debt buying crypto and bad art. There was one that prescribed moral self-improvement via polyamory, weight gain, and pop music; somehow, this managed to pass itself off as ‘leftism’ for the best part of a decade. Whatever its flavour, though, the real name for this ideology is hysteria. All this working on yourself, approaching your own self like a raw material in the production process—who am I? who am I?—means looking at yourself from the outside, through the eyes of someone or something else. The actual question: who am I to you? The trace of some shapeless, nameless, unidentifiable Other, the one you do it for, the one who would finally be able to tell you what you are.
People are tired of politics, not because politics has become too hysterical, but because in an age of stasis and patch-switching, politics is no longer an effective framework for their hysteria. It’s no longer satisfying to answer the question who am I to the other with a load of culture-war blather. Now, even political terrorism can become a form of self-improvement. In 2025, the new apoloticism will colonise even more beloved, old-fashioned political forms. The second Donald Trump presidency will be dominated by a kind of apolitical populism, directed more against seed oils and xenoestrogens than imports, migrants, or the liberal classes. (The end of last year saw a minor civil war within the MAGA movement over the H1B visa. On one side, a lingering residue of mawkish reactionaries who genuinely thought Trump would send all the foreigners home; on the other, Trump’s new coterie of fundamentally apolitical Silicon Valley solutionists, with firms powered by migrant labour. As always, the people who believe in politics will lose.) There will be apolitical conspiracy theories again. Fewer references to how they are secretly planning to destroy your life; more cryptids, UFOs, lost continents. Instead of unbearable scolds fretting about books and films that don’t express the right political values, you’ll see unbearable scolds fretting about books and films that don’t encourage personal growth. Some countries on the periphery of the empire might experience an apolitical civil war. One year from now, you will realise with a dazed alarm that you didn’t even argue about politics over the Thanksgiving table. You just bickered about the polyunsaturates in the food.